Kiss the Bullet

by Catherine Deveney

  “You know you said Pearson can’t know about this conversation?” Stella says.

  Danni nods.

  “Well I can tell you stuff he can’t know either.”

  She has begin to shake more noticeably. She wraps her jacket round her front, a gesture so reminiscent of Myra the night she died that it gives Danni a pang. It makes her think of watching a child shuffle in her mother’s shoes.

  “What is it, Stella?” Johnny asks. He has been silent but is suddenly alert.

  “Myra had a client that she said was our path out. She was biding her time.”

  “What did that mean? Was he in love with her?” asks Danni.

  Stella shakes her head almost impatiently.

  “It’s not bloody Pretty Woman,” she says scornfully. The only ones who fall for you are dirt poor. Myra had her share of them all right. She had this guy who used to pay her to talk. Just to sit and talk. He’d bring her flowers and stuff. Said he wanted to marry her.”

  “What happened?”

  “His mum said he couldn’t,” says Stella, with a little splutter of a laugh.

  Even Johnny smiles, Danni notices.

  “Myra said he was frightened of being rejected. He went to prostitutes because they were the only women he felt superior to. Then he fell for Myra. Men often fell for her. She’s even got this Catholic priest who is a client. But she said the trouble with him was that he had no money to buy her silence. There wasn’t enough in the collection plate.”

  “So who was the man who was going to be her path out?”

  “It was someone really, really senior in the legal profession. Not the usual job. Some guy Pearson arranged for her to go and see. He told Myra she had to be specially nice to him.”

  “What was his name?” asks Johnny.

  Stella hesitates.

  “I don’t know. Myra said it was safer if she didn’t tell me. She didn’t want Pearson to think I knew. But I could tell from the questions he asked me yesterday that he thinks I do know.”

  “And you really don’t?”

  “No.”

  “What did Myra tell you?”

  “She said he was reckless, that he didn’t touch alcohol or drugs but he got drunk on adrenalin and danger, on the buzz of risk. Arrogant too. He thought he could get away with it and nobody would find out. But Myra found out.”

  “Found out what?” says Danni.

  “Who he was.” She pauses, shivering. “Myra reckoned he would pay enough for her silence to get us out and cleaned up and get a new start. She was sure him and Pearson had some kind of arrangement. Scratched each other’s backs. He turned a blind eye to some of Pearson’s business stuff and Pearson protected him. But Myra was pushing it.”

  “Trying to get money?” says Johnny.

  Stella nods.

  “She told me the day before she died that she had confronted the guy, told him she knew who he was and that she wanted enough money for me and her to get out.”

  “How did he take it?”

  “Furious, Myra said. She said she thought he really thought prostitutes would be too stupid to know who he was. But Myra had seen him once on the news on telly. There was a public awareness campaign about tightening up the prosecution of prostitution and he headed the press conference.”

  “But he was going to a prostitute himself?” says Danni.

  “Myra said he got his kicks from that. She reckoned that was the whole point for him, being in a position of public power but pushing the boundaries in private.”

  Stella drains the vodka and coke in her glass.

  “Can I have another of these?” she says.

  Johnny picks up the glass raises his eyebrows in silent enquiry at Danni’s glass. She puts her hand over it, shakes her head. Stella watches him as he walks to the bar.

  “Is he your man?” she asks, nodding at Johnny.

  “No.” Danni can’t help sounding brusque.

  “He will be. There’s something between yous.”

  Danni says nothing.

  “He’s quite good looking in a funny kind of way,” Stella says eventually. “I think he’s nice. You kind of trust him.”

  Danni looks over her shoulder, watches Johnny at the bar, the stillness of him. A whirl of confusion spins inside her. She turns back, sees Stella’s eyes on her.

  “Myra was certain who the guy was?” Danni asks.

  “Positive. She said he was familiar right away but it took her a while to realise where from. Guys like him, she said, they get their kicks bungee jumping off their careers, taking risks. She said that’s the way men are.”

  “She didn’t like men?”

  “They let her down. Any guy she ever had cheated on her. She didn’t think they were worth much. She said to me once that the punters looked at her with disgust after they’d done it to her. They didn’t know she looked at them with disgust from the minute they stopped their cars for her.” She looks up, a bit apologetically, at Johnny who has returned to the table with her glass and stands listening. He sets it down on the table in front of her, sits back down quietly, saying nothing.

  “Myra told me not to tell anyone I knew anything,” says Stella.

  “And certainly not Pearson. She said it was too dangerous for me. The less I knew the better. She said she would handle it and then … and then we’d get out …”

  “What were you going to do?” asks Danni.

  Stella looks helplessly at her, eyes filling like pools. “I don’t know,” she whispers. “Just get out of here … I don’t know, really …”

  A dream without shape or definition, Danni thinks, a fairytale of escape. Things would be better. They would no longer be drug addicts. No longer be prostitutes. And the reality of that, the way of making it happen, was just a shadow behind the wall of longing.

  “You have to get out immediately,” Johnny says. “Away from Pearson.”

  Both women turn to him, Stella eyeing him fearfully.

  “You think …”

  “If Pearson thinks you know the identity of this guy, leave. It puts you in too much danger. It doesn’t matter that you don’t if he thinks you do.”

  “Stella,” Danni says, “what do you think happened to Myra that night?”

  Stella shrugs, but Danni knows she is simply too frightened to say what is inside her.

  “Stella …”

  The tears are trickling down Stella’s face now.

  “Stella …” Danni reaches across the table and clasps the girl’s hand.

  “I’m scared.”

  “I know.”

  She strokes Stella’s hand to calm her. Johnny is tense beside her. Danni can feel it. It’s like a heat emanating from him, his body taut like stretched wire. She looks at him. He’s looking straight ahead, straight out of the window and somewhere beyond them. He’s working on his own theories in there, she thinks, turning back to Stella.

  “You think this legal guy killed Myra?” she asks softly.

  Stella shakes her head. “Well … not personally …”

  “Who then?”

  Beside her, Johnny turns his head.

  “You really need to ask, Danni?” he says, and his voice is hard and marbled with bitterness.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  They walk together but apart, Danni conscious of leaving a gap between her and Johnny. He seems lost in thought, his hands thrust into the pockets of the black coat that he wears open, a scarf wrapped loosely round his neck and trailing. His cheeks are dark with evening stubble. The buckle of his knee as he walks is barely noticeable to her any more, a slight dip, a soft roll in his gait. There is something so companionable about their walking together that it angers her. She increases the distance between them.

  She has no knowledge of where they walk, past rows of suburban housing, curtains open, lit by flickering televisions and the soft glow of table lamps. A young boy on a bicycle emerges fast from behind, making Danni jump, swishing inches from her, the tyres hissing in the wet of the rain
soaked streets. She is following Johnny unthinkingly, until suddenly she finds herself somewhere she recognises. A row of shops, a launderette like an overbright beacon of light, a single occupant pulling strings of clothes from a machine. A newsagent, window lit with Halloween faces. She looks round, gets her bearings. They are close to Johnny’s flat.

  Her phone rings. She takes it out, looks at the number. Traynor. She switches it off and tosses it back into her bag. Johnny has walked on. He turns.

  “I’ll get a taxi to the hotel,” she says.

  Johnny walks back towards her.

  “I’ll make you a cup of coffee then take you back in a taxi to the hotel, check your room.”

  “There’s no need.”

  “I think there is.”

  “I don’t need you.”

  He shrugs.

  “Maybe not. No harm though, eh?”

  The soft Irish cadences of his accent wrap around the words, caressing them. She looks at him and realises she has lost sight of why she came here. There have been so many competing emotions. Why is she getting caught up in all this? She came for Marco. For Angelo. But they’re dead, she thinks suddenly. And Myra’s dead. But Stella’s not. Yet.

  “You shouldn’t have told Stella which hotel you were staying in.”

  “Why not? It was the least I could do. We shouldn’t have left her.”

  “We couldn’t do anything else.”

  “Yes we could.”

  “We had no choice.”

  “There’s always a fucking choice,” she spits at him. If he had chosen differently, she thinks, her life would be different.

  Angelo, she wants to scream when she looks at him. A silent wail spirals inside her from her guts, a physical force ripping through her like a tornado. Ang … e … l … o.

  He understands the pain but not yet the reason for it. His eyes drop. He frowns at the pavement, his hands still thrust deep in his coat pockets.

  “We need to talk. Come inside.”

  She stands mutinously watching him as he walks forward to the stairs up to the flat. At the top of the steps he opens the door and leans against it with his back. He does not coax her, nor even look at her. She moves forward out of the dark street into the light of the stairwell.

  Upstairs, they remain silent as he turns the dial of the gas fire and it clicks, hisses into life cheerlessly. There is a grey patch on the wall round the fire. She wonders if he notices any more. When he makes coffee, the noises seem magnified against a background of silence: the bang of the cupboard door, the sound of water on metal as he fills the kettle, the hiss of steam, the scrape of a teaspoon against the cup.

  “We can’t do anything with Stella until she’s ready to help herself,” he says, setting down a mug.

  “We could get her out of there for a start.”

  “And take her where? Here? Your hotel room? Stella’s an addict, Danni. You’d be living with her habit. And she’d be asking you for money and when you reached the stage beyond politeness where you said no, she’d end up taking it from you anyway. Oh she wouldn’t mean to at the start. She wouldn’t want to. But she would.”

  “How come you know so bloody much?” Danni folds her arms. “How come, smart ass?”

  “Because I lived with an addict.”

  She sits up instinctively. His tone is not aggressive and yet she senses challenge, emotional challenge. He watches her, as if waiting – with a neutral kind of interest – to see how she responds to that challenge. As if he is curious but not personally invested in the result. She wonders if detachment is a trick he plays. On others. On himself.

  “Who …”

  “A woman.”

  His right leg is crossed over his knee in a wide triangle. He reaches out, dusts imaginary flecks of dust off his trouser leg with his index finger.

  “A woman?”

  “A woman very much like Stella. Young. Messed up.” He licks his finger and rubs it against his shoe.

  “What …?

  “I lived with her,” he says.

  Despite herself, she is interested. What kind of lover does a terrorist make? Can you compartmentalise a personality? In this drawer is his capacity to blow her child into the air, to drown a mother in the rivers of her own child’s blood. In this drawer is his capacity for tenderness, for whispered intimacy rippling through his life, like a breeze through tangled grasses.

  “What happened?”

  “She died.”

  He clears his throat in the silence.

  She cannot bring herself to say she is sorry.

  “Overdose?”

  Johnny shakes his head, readjusts himself in his seat, sits back.

  The possibilities flip through her head … Car crash? Tragic illness? Should she ask? Stay silent?

  “Pearson,” he says, and underneath the jolt of fear that shoots through her, she is aware of the creak of his chair as he stands up. He lifts his cup, takes it to the sink. She hears the running water as the cup is rinsed out, the bang of it being placed on the draining board. She is sitting motionless when he comes back in the room.

  “What did he do?”

  Johnny walks to the gas fire hanging on the wall, reaches out his hand for the dial.

  “Are you cold?” he says, turning the dial further so that she hears the surge of gas hissing through the fire.

  “What did he do?”

  He sits down again.

  “It’s hard … that’s … not the place to start.”

  “Start where you like.”

  He tilts his head back, blowing out a sigh almost in defeat at the challenge of giving shape to his thoughts with words.

  “Pearson and me … our lives have been kind of tangled up together. He’s made sure of that. It’s like different strands of a rope that are wound round each other. And every time I’ve tried to extricate myself from that, he’s made sure that I’m brought back into the knot. I suppose … I suppose it started after … You remember I told you about Pat?”

  “Your brother?”

  He nods.

  “It was after that I joined the IRA with Pearson.”

  “Because Pat died?”

  “It was the first time I’d seen a dead body. I was terrified. I couldn’t … I just couldn’t get my head round it …” He pauses. “Then a week later there was another dead body. Two streets away. I only knew the boy vaguely, but he’d been shot by the soldiers and I looked down at the chalk white of his face, the terrible stillness of a body that had been walking that morning … running … and I knew things had changed. I’d changed. I still felt frightened but I felt more angry. Furiously angry. The British army had moved into my streets, were killing my people … They had no right … no right …”

  “I don’t understand how you could look at a dead body and want to kill someone.”

  She is thinking of her own first dead body but she does not want to go back there. She was too young to see her father but she saw her mother, cold as marble, and the sick fear of incomprehension had overwhelmed her. Where was she, her mother? Her body lay empty, like a burned out shell in which there had been some kind of electrical implosion. All wires dead; all movement impossible. And it had been so utterly enormous that she could not imagine wanting to create that state in somebody else. Death, in all its terribleness, affirmed your own sense of being alive. The last thing it did was make you want to take life away.

  “Why would you do that?” she persists.

  “Because we were at war. This country was at war. And when you are at war … things … you know the rules change.”

  “Land is worth killing for? Possession is worth the loss of others?”

  Johnny shakes his head.

  “It’s not just about land, Danni. Yes, land is part of it and this land … my parents, my grandparents, my great grandparents are all buried in it. I have a stake in it.”

  She moved around too much as a child to understand that feeling. Home was temporary, an army base, a rented flat. A place wh
ere her mother tried to make old curtains fit new windows.

  “But it’s about politics as well as land,” Johnny continues. “And sure, politics is only the way you want to live. The way you want to organise yourselves as a community. This struggle has been about ideas and principles. It’s been about more than the living and dying of a single generation.”

  “If you are prepared to die for your principles, that’s your choice,” Danni retorts. “But what about the people who weren’t prepared to die for your principles? The ones who had no choice? What about the innocent people caught up in it all?”

  “That includes my grandfather, Danni. The innocent aren’t all on one side.” He catches her eye and holds it fiercely, wills her to come clean with him. “What are we talking about here, Danni?”

  “The things you have done.”

  “How do you know what I’ve done?”

  “Pearson …” She hesitates, wrong-footed.

  “Oh Pearson … right …” His hair has fallen forward onto his face and he pushes it back exasperatedly with one hand.

  Of course, Danni thinks suddenly. Why should she believe Pearson? Perhaps … She looks at him and is surprised by the surge of emotion that blossoms inside her. Why is she feeling this? Perhaps, she thinks, he is merely a terrorist and not the terrorist. Whatever else he is responsible for, perhaps he was not responsible for the deaths of Angelo and Marco. That would mean that her journey here had been a waste of time. The ordeal of this last week would be for nothing. And yet this emotion inside her means that is exactly what she hopes. She recognises it as a tiny surge of hope, a tentative fluttering, like the wings of a tiny bird inside her.

  She cannot deny it. There is something that draws her to him. “I asked Pearson to put me in touch with someone who had been involved in bombings on the British. He put me in touch with you because he said you had been involved in the 1992 December bombing in Glasgow. He thought that since I came from Scotland, I would be interested in that.”